We don’t have patrons anymore or benefactors, at least I don’t.  If you do, fork one over to me.  All of us have relationships and full and rich lives besides managing our painting careers.  If one of our loved ones get sick or is in trouble, we hang up our apron and rush to help.  When those things happen in clusters and we are away from the easel for a long time, we suffer.  We suffer terribly at first and then gradually the hunger is muffled.  For me, the other thing that gets “short-shifted” is my art relationships.  I can’t even reply to emails because I would have to explain so much and feel so sad.  Gone are the blithe phone conversations with friends at their easels or out in a field, standing in a “cow-pie.  I am sad anyway.
Now I am back.  Everyone is healed in one way or another and I am free to paint and when I am not painting I am thinking about it.

One by one I reconnect with my buddies.  The cheer in their voices is food to me.  There are no “where the heck have you been?”  They are just glad to hear me.

So, I am back and my arm is painting the way it knows to paint and I am happy.

My work, after a four year hiatus from daily painting, was embarrassingly bad.  It looked like those clumsy illustrations in your high-school year book.  I couldn’t mix colors; I couldn’t remember how to use medium; I couldn’t remember what medium

I used; and even my lifelong drawing skills failed me (hence the year book reference).

Poor Tom.  He and the dog came in from their “tractoring,” and he st00d over my shoulder to see how I was doing.  My response to his concern was to scribble out the face.  They both sulked away with their ears back.

I stomped my easel to a back bedroom and closed the door.  I called my friend Jean (a therapist) just to say, “Hi”.  Jean is a witch and could see my face through my cell phone.  “What’s wrong?” she asks.  “I suck,” I answered…or maybe I said “life suc

ks” or “all is lost,” something mature.   Jean says, “Well, would you like to tap about this?”  With a sucking intake of air, I responded “yes..s..s…hic”.

It’s the tapping you all want to know about.  She led me to tap around the crown of my head, inside and

outside my wrists and ankles, all the while saying, “Even though my painting sucks now, I can paint and will paint well again.”  I did it 2 times and Bingo! I could paint like the wind.  I could paint “with no mind.”  The painting, “Yellow Leather Coat,” was finished the end of the next day.

I love painting and I love Jean more.